Lift Loop - Programmers with Experience

🚀 About the Project In the Bronx, nearly 1 in 3 households lives below the poverty line, and yet millions of dollars in public support go unused each year. Not because people don’t need help — but because they don’t know where to go, what they qualify for, or how to get started.

That’s what inspired us to build LiftLoop — a digital lifeline for underserved communities to discover food support, job programs, housing help, free clinics, and more, right from their phone.

Our goal wasn’t just to list resources — there are already hundreds of outdated, confusing databases. We wanted to build something smart, dynamic, and human-first — a tool that responds to what someone types (“I need help paying rent”) and instantly matches them with programs that are local, available, and relevant.

🛠️ How We Built It We built the app with Next.js, hosted on Vercel for speed and reliability. Our backend runs on Supabase, giving us live database capabilities and easy user management. For our resource search, we integrated Deep Seek's API key to experiment with dynamic filters and geographic results.

😅 Challenges We Faced Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to actually serve people in crisis, not just show them links. We iterated on how to match needs to programs quickly, how to stay lightweight enough for older phones, and how to eventually loop in volunteers or officials when the system doesn’t have a perfect match.

We also had to juggle new tech (Supabase auth, search queries, filtering logic) in a short time — but we learned a ton.

🌍 What’s Next Lift Loop is just the beginning. We’re actively exploring partnerships with local Bronx organizations to keep our resource list accurate and timely. We want to add offline mode, multi-language support, and even live volunteer assistance in the future with triage.

Most of all, we want this tool to be as accessible and helpful as possible — whether someone’s on an iPhone or a budget Android phone, whether they’re 15 or 75.

Because everyone deserves to know where help is.

Built With

• deepseek
• javascript
• next
• react
• supabase
• tailwind
• typescript